Sandra Laugier

What do we know, with all our biological and scien-
tific knowledge, about love and its mystery? What do
we know about joy? (Que savons-nous, avec nos con-
naissances biologiques, scientifiques, de l'amour et de
son mystère? Que savons-nous de la joie?)

-- Françoise Dolto, L'évangile au risque de la psychanalyse

This must then be the moment when one does not
quite discover religion . . . but rather, possibly, when
the sky falls in on you. (Donc ça doit être le moment
où on découvre non pas la religion . . . mais où, peut-
être, le ciel vous tombe dessus.)

-- Jean-Luc Godard, L'autre journal

THE APPEARANCE in early 1985 of Hail Mary caused, at least in France, a
scandal that anticipated in a way the still more serious disturbances (in propor-
tion, perhaps, to the film's resources or to its potential audience) that attended
the release of Martin Scorsese The Last Temptation of Christ. After five years,
we heard the same arguments in support of what was an insupportable cause--
a plea to ban, or destroy, a movie perceived as shocking. It is not my intention
to compare the two films. What is remarkable, however, is the similarity of the
scandals. What really shocks us is not the so-called blasphemy, the supposedly
"pornographic" images (Mary shown naked or Jesus Christ making love). We
have seen worse, even in this area. The scandal is not really in the images but
in what they imply: Mary and her son seen as ordinary human beings ( Scorsese
has essentially been reproached for portraying Jesus Christ as a "shabby"
character) who would then have nothing extraordinary about them. This is
didactically shown in Scorsese's film and rendered immediately obvious in
Hail Mary. Consider the gas station, the basketball game, and so on. The two
movies would seem to run on parallel but inverted paths, the Scorsese showing
that an extraordinary life contains (the possibility of ordinary lefe--and a
somewhat shabby one at that--the Godard showing that ordinary life is really
extraordinary, or in any case mysterious, perhaps even miraculous. The latter
idea is perhaps the more scandalous one, as we shall see.

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